How Pavel Řehák is remaking Direct into an AI-first company

The Direct group is undergoing its biggest transformation in twelve years, and its founder Pavel Řehák makes no secret of it: the company is quite literally being rebuilt from the ground up. The changes have started against the backdrop of a record year, the highest profit in the company's history, and a successful entry into the Polish market.

“Every two or three years we've changed,” says Řehák, but this time it's a far more radical step. The company has decided to build its business on an “AI first and AI enabled” principle — meaning artificial intelligence becomes not an add-on but the foundation of every process. The entrepreneur himself describes it with a metaphor he often uses: “ripping up the rails” and laying new ones.

In practice, this means the insurance company stays an insurance company — the call centre still runs, the customer is still at the centre of attention — but the structure of roles inside the company is changing radically. New positions have emerged, for example specialists who oversee the work of AI agents, making sure their actions stay safe and consistent.

According to Řehák, preparing for this transformation took a year and a half: the team tested and showed employees how artificial intelligence could be used in real, everyday work. That required giving people far more autonomy and room for creativity than ever before.

The Direct founder also acknowledges the flip side of the changes — not everyone is ready for this level of uncertainty. In his observation, employees fall into two camps: those who find the new conditions liberating and start working faster, and those who feel lost and expect the company to take on more hand-holding and explaining.

Řehák himself is the former CEO of Česká pojišťovna, who after 2013 began building his own business from scratch. Today the Direct group brings together insurance, corporate expense management, technology projects, investments, and car sales and servicing. The entire holding is managed by the investment group Vigo Investments.

By the Around Prague newsroom